Join Whitney Wood, CIH Visiting Fellow and recently-named Associated Medical Services (AMS) Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Medicine for a presentation on Canadian women’s grassroots efforts to achieve birth reform. From the mid-1940s onwards, these women spoke out against what they saw as the harmful or abusive features of Canadian obstetric practice, and described their efforts to secure respectful and compassionate medical care.

Indigenous peoples are usually at the receiving end of the scientific gaze. Biomedical and policy interventions aimed at Indigenous populations have often been structured by colonial worldviews. This talk highlights Indigenous resistance to colonial research and both researchers and Indigenous peoples’ efforts transform scientific research, technology development, and training in order to increase the benefit of technoscience for Indigenous peoples. It also highlights Indigenous governance of and through technoscience.

Join us for the next Calgary Institute for the Humanities Visiting Fellows' Lecture. Julia Smith is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers University.

Although the term “women’s movement” is often used to describe feminist activity, in reality distinct differences exist between the people and groups who engage in feminist activism. This talk will examine the feminist unions and labour organizations that women in Western Canada established in the 1970s and 1980s to address gender inequality at work and in society.

Uta Hinrichs will examine visualization as a creative, sometimes speculative, sometimes tedious thinking process, rather than a means to an end. Based on different visualization case studies, she will illustrate how embracing visualization as a process – be it from-scratch or using established visualization tools – can bring to the fore rich, but unexpected discoveries that are born out of synergies emerging from collaborations between visualization and humanities researchers. An emphasis on "process" may open up new ways of discussing the role of visualization across disciplines and contexts.

This talk is co-hosted with the Calgary Institute for the Humanities' "Thinking Data, Data Thinking" working group.

Western agriculture experienced a socio-ecological transition from traditional organic agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century to modern industrial agriculture at the end of the twentieth century. Nowhere was this transformation more profound than the U.S. Great Plains. Drawing on research from the Sustainable Farm Systems project, this talk presents social metabolism methodology as a means of exploring the role of energy in the history of agroecosystems, and uses case studies from the Great Plains to draw conclusions about the sustainability of industrial agriculture in the twentieth century.

While the explosion of new sources of data and analytical techniques has left cities clamoring to become ‘smart’, the availability of this data hasn’t led to an inexorable shift towards either more rational governance nor more equitable outcomes. This talk explores how the rise of data-driven urban governance has corresponded with the emergence of a kind of ‘post-truth’ politics, where appeals to data and scientific expertise carry even less weight than they might have previously.

Join us for a provocative talk on the relationship between art and commerce in the 20th Century. Russell Smith is a freelance journalist and cultural commentator, publishing in The New York Review of Books, The Globe and Mail, Details, Toronto Life, NOW, Flare, Toro, and Sharp. An expert on language, he was the host of the popular CBC Radio One program “And Sometimes Y” for two seasons. He has twice won the National Magazine Award for fiction, and his novel Muriella Pent was selected as best fiction of its year by Amazon.ca.

In this paper, I present some of my most intriguing detective cases from the period of my CIH Fellowship and some solutions. In the description of Sir Gawain's antagonist in the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, two colour words are used that are of uncertain meaning, "fade" and "enker." I spent my Humanities Institute Fellowship investigating the language used in this poem and the three other poems that exist in the same 14th century manuscript, Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience, none of which is known in another copy.